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Comment by simonw

9 hours ago

"No systemd. No sshd. No cron. No logging daemon."

You can delete that sentence. Why would someone assume sshd or cron in an environment like this?

Omit needless words.

It's perhaps the most pernicious Claudism. Or just the one that gets my goat the most. Saying what something isn't, usually twice, before saying what it is. What a fucking waste of words.

  • That's the most annoying one, and the two negated things more often than not end up being something no one would have ever considered in the first place.

  • I'm not defending claudeslop, but TBF, anaphora and its lesser-known sibling: epistrophe far predate the English language, let alone something new like LLMs.

    • "I'm not defending claudeslop, but <defends slop>". People obviously know this. The problem is that using a dramatic rhetorical flourish every third sentence for completely un-dramatic things is fucking tiring. And so are the people defending this shit. "Oh, humans use em-dashes too, so actually there's literally no difference between a human using one or two and Claude using 400 em-dashes in one article". A human using things correctly and a language model using them incorrectly are not the same fucking thing.

  • Got it. No bullshit, no ceremony: just straight to the point.

    • I don’t get no respect. I don’t get no respect at all.

      I say to the guy, “That looks load-bearing.”

      He looks at me like I just insulted his mother. “What the hell does that even mean?”

      This is the same guy who asked me to rebuild Twitter. No bugs. By Friday.

“It is difficult to get [an AI] to [omit words, which are counted as tokens], when [it’s company’s] paycheck depends on [it] not [omitting words].”